About Us

The Shrub Swap and Reuse Hub is Edinburgh’s hub for creative reuse. In 4 years it’s grown from an idea into an exciting community hub for sustainable living.

We’ve put loads of love into our space on Guthrie Street and it’s looking and running better than ever, offering hundreds of creative reuse and repair workshops and enabling you to reduce your waste by swapping things you don’t need for things you do.

We’d love to welcome you to our community! Get involved by becoming a member from just £12 per year, sign up for our newsletter and check out our volunteering opportunities.

Our vision

SHRUB Swap & Reuse Hub is a community-led co-operative working for a world without waste.

Our Purpose [Aims & Objectives]

To provide a welcoming space for rethinking our relationship to waste, reducing consumption and developing effective use of resources

To support community empowerment in Edinburgh, learning and sharing skills to make a practical difference to the world we share

To deliver innovative waste prevention, creative reuse and repair practices in a living laboratory of Circular Economy

Our values

We value inclusivity and work with others to provide a welcoming community for all

We act with integrity and strive to be sustainable in everything we do

We live by co-operative values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity.

Every September, freshers at the University of Edinburgh can collect, for free, all the stuff left behind by previous graduate students. This project, and the cooperative behind it, shows the crucial role of young people in fighting climate change.

Several years, a group of students at the University of Edinburgh noticed that when students moved out of halls of residence, they would often leave behind items which they could not carry or felt no use for anymore. All of this used to end up in the bin, headed for landfill. A few months later, new students would buy new materials which would end up in the bin at the end of the year. More